Cloud Computing Info

Sign Up For AWS

First things first, if you don’t have an Amazon.com account, go get one. If you do have one, you can use the one you already have. Amazon offers personal and corporate accounts. A person may have both accounts and can choose which to use when purchasing items.

It also may make sense that all employees have a business only account that uses their work email to log into the service. That way you never have an issue where purchases or billing can go to the wrong place.

Or, you may do like I have done in the past, put all expenses on a personal card and expense them back to the company.

Amazon DevPay

Amazon DevPay is an easy to use billing system for AWS developers. Build your cloud application, allow users to sign up and use your application and let Amazon bill them for you.

DevPay is “AWS-Aware” in that it ties into the billing of AWS services. Instead of a user having to sign up for AWS and be billed separately, you can add in the AWS costs to your costs and just bill the users directly.

DevPay is web based and uses Amazon Payments. The web interface allows you to register your application and set your pricing.

Using and Managing Amazon Web Services (AWS)

I personally believe that AWS is perfect for any development and testing environment. Regardless of how sensitive your data is, you can build your applications and test them in a cloud environment using bogus data.

For production environments, the choice is much harder. Does the country(ies) you operate in have strict privacy, or data on-shoring, laws that would be impact your applications? If you can easily offshore your applications, you can easily use cloud computing.

Does the area where you work have reliable infrastructure?

Mechanical Turk

Mechanical Turk is an odd service. It’s called an “on-demand workforce” or peopleware. For large tasks that need to be automated but also require human intelligence, Mechanical Turk is the tool.

One of the examples Amazon uses is if you have 1,000,000 (one million) images that need to be tagged and categorized, you can use Mechanical Turk to “hire” 10,000 employees. You get to pick what you will pay and only those “turks” who want the work will sign up.

Amazon picks up 10% (additive) to whatever you pay someone.

Amazon FWS

FWS is the Amazon Fulfillment Service.

CloudFront

Amazon CloudFront is Amazon’s Content Delivery Network (CDN). A CDN puts very large servers with high throughput at the edge of the network. That means that a CDN provider put cached data in multiple locations through out the network (internet). Requests for data are routed to a local server cache instead of the main server at a host. This improves performance, customer experience and possibly even costs (via lower bandwidth requirements).

An example would be a company that serves many pages to many users. Rather than have all of the pages stored in a central location and be accessed by many people all at once, the pages are distributed throughout the network and sit on many different servers.

Amazon Flexible Payments

Amazon Flexible Payments Service (FPS) is a set of web services that allow businesses or developers to bill users using the Amazon payment infrastructure (like a PayPal or Google Checkout). As a seller or a buyer, you can set limits on usage either globally or for specific senders and/or receivers. A gatekeeper component enforces the rules.

As a sender you can limit the number of transactions, transaction dates, dollar amounts, recipients and daily, weekly or monthly spending limits. Recipients can specify all of those and can specify allowable payment methods (credit card, bank transfer and amazon payments) and who pays the transaction fee.

One of the goals of FPS is to make micropayments effective and financially cost effective.